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Music Pick: Keys to the Kingdom

December 17, 2010

James Rhodes, the first classical musician ever signed to Warner Bros. Records, comes with a rock-and-roll look (black jeans, long hair), a rock-and-roll backstory (he has been through childhood abuse, drug use, and mental illness), and rock-and-roll tastes (a playlist he made for the Spectator mentions Jellyfish, Queen, and Ben Folds alongside Chopin, Shostakovich, and Bach). Yet Rhodes’s major-label début, an ambitious double disc titled “Bullets & Lullabies,” makes no real concessions to rock, title aside. The selections are all classical, with the bullets being short and energetic (Ravel’s Toccata, Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King,” and pieces by Moszkowski and Alkan) and the lullabies longer and more inward (a pair from Debussy, Brahms, Rachmaninov). The quality of the playing is indisputable, and the slower disc marginally more satisfying, but it’s almost beside the point—to justify Warner’s investment, Rhodes will have to break through to pop ears.

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